Breathe:

More Kindness for Ourselves and Each Other

Leaf with three lobes and sawtooth edges, like triangles along edge. Network of three main lines, with each line dividing and subdividing into smaller lines. bright green along three main lines. light yellow, white, and red colors.

In summer, it's a wonderful time to be outside, whether in the foggy days of the Bay or in the bright sunshine. Long evenings and sometimes opportunities for travel bring us closer in connection with the natural world. You might take a moment to notice the trees around you, even if you can see part of a tree out of a window or find one planted by a volunteer on a sidewalk.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer beautifully says in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, "Trees constitute the environmental quality committee – running air and water purification service 24 – 7. They are on every task force, from the historical society picnic to the highway department, school board, and library. When it comes to civic beautification, they alone create the crimson fall with little recognition… These processes are what ecological scientists term ecosystem services, the structures and functions of the national world that make life possible.… And yet these services go unaccounted for in the human economy.… We get them for free, donated continually by maples."

Leaf Meditation

If you like, take a moment and observe a tree. You might look deeply at it, as if getting ready to draw it. Noticing the shapes of the leaves and their colors, how different parts of the leaf give way to a range of colors. Noticing the network of lines.

The pattern of lines in tree leaves make fractals, amazing geometric patterns and shapes in which each part is similar to the whole and similar patterns repeat at progressively smaller scales.

Do these network of lines remind you of anything? They might call to mind the patterns in lungs, blood vessels, or other parts of the body.

Coming back to the tree, gently.

If you are close enough, you might touch a leaf, whether it is on the ground or still connected to a living tree. Feeling the texture.

Author

She has completed several levels of study in teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, including a professional training program under the direction of Dr. Saki Santorelli and Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn and a training in teaching Mindful Eating, through UCSD.

She is deeply engaged with science-based and traditional approaches to healing through food and self-care. Her trainings include Food As Medicine; The Gut Brain; and Preventing and Managing Chronic Inflammation: Special Focus: Nutritional Interventions. She has been practicing meditation and yoga since 1999.

Finding mindfulness, movement, and food to make big differences in her own healing from chronic pain, she feels called to share what she is learning with others and to help people make their own discoveries. She is committed to a feminist approach that honors all body shapes and sizes while collaborating in radiant wellness.